GetSetJetSet

BA 2585

GetSetJetSet

BA 794
LHR-HEL
Airbus A320-200
G-EUUE
Seat 2A (Business)
Flight #97 of 2019

After a very short visit with my gf’s family…and of course they made a point of reminding me it was too short and I should stay for longer, it was time to head back to the airport…LHR T3 this time.

Although her very sweet parents offered to drive me, I was departing at 5:30am, so I insisted they sleep and I’d take an uber.

My gf walked me to the car, and we parted, both sad about our impending TWELVE DAYS apart, but it is what it is, we both need to spend Christmas with our respective families.

The ride out to LHR in the darkness was quick, and once in T3, I was surprised to see that BA have a mini-F check-in there. Sadly it does not come with the dedicated security line that T5 has. It looked like this little carve out is for BA F, AA F, JL F and OWE. Perhaps this is the same as the AA Flagship F check-in I used previously? I was half awake and not really paying attention.

Once through security, I checked if the QF lounge was open, because they make good iced coffee, something which the CX lounge seems unable to do. It was too early, so I walked back towards the shops, and PAID for coffee (gasp). I think it was Café Nero, something like that. I took my coffee back over to CX and grabbed a runway-side lounge chair to relax until boarding.

A few seats over, there was a Father of the Year candidate absolutely guzzling free champagne while “watching” his child who was under 10 years old. Keep in mind, this was around 6:30am, and it was just the Dad and the kid, no Mother or any sober adult to keep tabs on the kid…responsible.

The BA and AY flights to HEL leave around the same time, so I made sure I was at the right gate. On board, it was the dreaded 2A again.

I had hoped to sleep, but after two coffees, I was wired and it wasn’t in the cards. BA served a full English on the flight, and I finished reading the study guide for my check ride oral exam. I’ll need to review it a few times before the real thing.

As we descended into HEL it was clear that it was not going to be a nice day weather-wise. Low ceilings, overcast rain and sunset predicted at 3:14pm.

It’s crazy, you don’t realize just how depressing it is to rarely see the sun until you’re subjected to it. I used to date a Swedish girl, and when I would spend time with her in Stockholm in the winter, it was just terrible. Wake up in the dark, walk around at 2-3pm and it’s pitch black out. I’d see kids walking home after school and think “who are these parents letting their kids run wild in the middle of the night” then realize it was like 4pm. Really awful, makes you appreciate nice, sunny weather that much more.

Despite the adverse conditions, landing was fine, taxi was short and exiting HEL was mostly painless. I say MOSTLY, because before leaving London, my gf asked me to bring a luggage piece with some clothing she needed back to our apt. in NYC. I HATE checking bags, but I agreed, so I had to wait for this 40-pound monstrosity in Helsinki, Toronto and finally LGA.

Otherwise, Helsinki has supplanted ZRH and MUC as my favorite airport to transit through in Europe. It is always so clean, empty, calm and efficient.

With the bags wrangled, I requested an uber. Soon I would be back at my favorite hotel in Scandinavia!

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BA 794

GetSetJetSet

Helsinki/Hotel Kamp

I first visited the Hotel Kamp in 2006 after arriving to Finland by boat from Sweden and before flying onwards to St. Petersburg. Since then I’d guess I’ve been to the hotel maybe 15 times? Perhaps more? I fly AY a lot as they frequently offer cheap biz fares to/from America and onwards to Asia, and there were also a number of stops over the years before/after taking ferries to the Baltics. It feels like a very familiar and comfortable blanket and I love going back. Overall I love Helsinki and consider it a very underrated city. There’s not a tremendous amount to do from a strictly tourist perspective, but there’s great nightlife, nice restaurants, a small and charming downtown core and one of these days I will actually get to an SM-Liiga game.

The ride in from HEL takes about 30 minutes. When we pulled up to the Kamp, I saw it was quite crowded. I waited behind 3-4 groups checking-in before I got to the desk.

The clerk, who I have dealt with before addressed me by name and welcomed me back to the hotel, then informed me they’d been able to upgrade me to my preferred room.

I always book the entry-level room, at the cheapest rate I can find and almost every time they manage to upgrade me to my favorite room which is (I think) a 3 class upgrade. With the excellent treatment they give me there, I would never even consider staying elsewhere. As a Leaders Club member, even the cheapest rates also come with Breakfast and access to the quasi-lounge at The Kamp. It’s only open a few hours/day and while it’s a nice room to sit in for a drink it’s nothing to write home about.

I dropped my bags in good old #814 , and went directly out to enjoy the last bit of gray daylight.

When I got back, I took a brief nap, since I had barely slept the night before, then got a workout in before going to meet friends. The Kamp has an excellent spa and a top-notch gym (for a hotel gym), both located on the 8th floor.

After the workout, I took a bath in the lovely tub in my room, then got ready and met some friends down in the Kamp Bar. I have a lot of Finnish friends from a combination of Ice Hockey, people I’ve met in my travels and friends of friends I have met and become friends with on previous visits to Helsinki so it’s always fun to catch up with them.

We drank at the Kamp bar for quite a while, then moved to Teatteri which is a bar/club just up Esplanadi.

I didn’t want to stay out too late and be hungover as I had to fly BACK to LHR the following afternoon and connect onwards to YYZ, so a little after 2am I irished and walked back to the hotel.

It was winter in Finland, and I was only wearing a dress shirt and sport coat. While we were at the Kamp I thought about going up to my room to grab a scarf, but surmised I’d probably lose it at the bar. On the brief but cold walk back, I regretted that decision BIGLY.

I fell asleep straight away and slept until around 10am. I didn’t need to leave until Noon, so I packed my bags and took another bath before heading for the exits.

In the past, the Kamp always took my card at check-in and I would just leave without checking out. I followed this plan on my way out, and at the airport got an e-mail from the hotel noting that new EU regulations require they not take the card until departure, and as such I hadn’t paid for my room or provided them with a payment method.

I apologized profusely and they send me a remote payment link and it was all sorted.

While I felt surprisingly good, my mood soured on the trip out to the airport. Uber was backed up and it was a 12 minute wait for a car. The uber price from central Helsinki to HEL is around 34Euro. I’ve done this trip MANY, MANY times, if you take a meter cab it’s slightly more $ but never even 50Euro usually somewhere in the 40-45 range.

I grabbed the first guy off the taxi rank in front of Kamp, some African “migrant” scammer as I would find out.

By the time we got to HEL, the meter read 75Euro. I asked him what he thought he was doing as this was clearly a scam and I wasn’t going to pay him 75euro since the ride is 45 MAX. He bloviated about how all cab companies are entitled to charge however they see fit and I told him that actually, I think the government had set the rate they were allowed to run the meter at, and this was illegal.

I asked for his info so I could report him to the authorities, then paid with a credit card, since I needed to get to my flight, and figured I would cancel the charge once back in the States. Screw that guy.

Never get in a meter cab in Helsinki off the street if you can avoid it. Scam city. It didn’t used to be that way, but like everywhere else, it seems Finland is going into the gutter.

I’m sure their 34-year old new PM will realistically deal with the problems facing the country though! I got angry all over again typing this up.

GetSetJetSet

Helsinki / Hotel Kamp

GetSetJetSet

AY 1335
HEL-LHR
Airbus A320-200
OH-LXD
Seat 1F (Business)
Flight #98 of 2019

Once clear of the $camcab and into the terminal things improved. HEL is such an easy airport to deal with.

I went right to AY Platinum Check-in, got my BP through to YYZ, then went up the escalator to priority security where there were zero people waiting ahead of or behind me.

From there, I went to immigration where perhaps three other people were waiting. Once stamped out of the EU, I grabbed a coffee from Starbucks, again with no one on line and made for the beautiful new AY Platinum Wing Lounge.

The old AY Lounge was OK, but AY have seriously upped their game. They have a business class lounge to the right, and another lounge for AY Plat and OWE to the left. This, much nicer lounge, has a great looking bar, a seating area with comfortable and private little cube chairs (pictures to follow), an a la carte dining are with buffet, and another darker and more chill quiet room. Of course, there are also shower facilities and a sauna…because it’s Finland after all, gotta have a sauna.

I only had about 30 minutes before I had to head to my gate, so I charged my phone and relaxed. The lounge is also rarely crowded, which is always nice.

Boarding for the flight to LHR was quick and my main takeaway from the entire trip was how much better the experience is flying AY. If you ever have a choice between BA and AY on HEL-LON, take AY, they both earn 2x EQM on AA and AY have nicer seats and nicer cabin crew. BA have really gone downhill the last few years, sad! Many people are saying this!

The flight was short and uneventful. I got a bit of sleep. We would be landing at T3 and I would have to take a bus transfer to T5 in order to make my connection onwards to YYZ.

Who doesn’t love changing terminals and dealing with high strung Heathrow security drones?

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GetSetJetSet

BA 99
LHR-YYZ
Boeing 787-8
G-ZBJK
Seat 2A (Business)
Flight #99 of 2019

This was it…the GRETZKY FLIGHT. Due to an odd confluence of events, this would be my 99th segment of 2019. As you can see it was also British Airways Flight #99 , AND most importantly, we were flying TO Toronto, the home of The Great One himself, #99 Wayne Gretzky (Brantford is close enough…it’s GTA right?).

The hassle with this flight began back in Helsinki. We had initially been scheduled for a 4-class 789, and I had selected Seat 11A.

The day before departure, I couldn’t get OLCI to work, and I was curious about the price to buy up to F, just for kicks.

I opened EF to check how the seatmap was looking and was surprised to see we were now scheduled to be on a 788, Seat 11A in Biz no longer existed and there was no F.

I called in to BA at this point and asked where my seat had been moved to, and found out it was unassigned and only lousy middles were left. I told the guy on the phone I’d selected a window seat months ago, and this was not really cool. He said 2A was showing blocked but unoccupied and he’d ask his supervisor if he could open it for me. I told him I was OWE if that would help grease the wheels. About 15 seconds later, he came back on and said no problem, I was in 2A. Crisis averted. No chance to buy up to the nonexistent F cabin though.

With my seats sorted, my only worry on arrival at LHR was getting from T3 to T5 in time. We landed a bit late from HEL, but I had ample time.

There was no one waiting for the intra-terminal bus, so that was nice. Once to T5 the security process was hellish as usual. I hate hate hate going through security at T5.

No gate had posted even though we were less than an hour from departure. I figured we would leave from the B or C satellite gates since this was a longhaul flight, and I didn’t want to waste time going to Galleries in the main building just to have to rush out.

While an exact gate didn’t post, the screen changed to indicate BA 99 would leave from somewhere on the B-concourse, so I went to the tram.

After a quick stop into the B-gate Galleries annex, I headed down to B47 for boarding. The guy in front of me looked out at our aircraft and told his travel companion he thought it was an A350…wishful thinking buddy, no Club Suites for us.

The BA Club World seat is tired, cramped and overall pretty lousy. One of the worst business class products in the sky I would say. You have to keep the partition down during take-off and landing, so if you’re a solo traveler this means being eyeball to eyeball with some random stranger which of course is great. You have to step over someone if you’re in a window and want to get out to hit the lav, during meal service the crew have to keep putting the divider up and down and reaching over the aisle pax to serve the window pax and the storage and plug placement is horribly thought out. The tray table is also small and flimsy, the IFE screens are small and burned out now as they are showing their age. You could only see my screen from certain angles, from others it was just shades of black and gray and shadow. Despite all of these fault, I always sleep well in the CW seat and at least the 747 UD Exit Row CW seats are comfortable.

The cabin crew were good anyway. Before departure they came around to take the bedding that had been placed on everyone’s seats and stow it in the overhead for takeoff…why not just keep the bedding stowed until after takeoff?

Before take-off, I started “Blinded by the Light” because I like Bruce Springsteen’s music. I did find it a bit odd that there was ANOTHER movie out about a South Asian and classic rock music. The other of course being “Yesterday.” Is this like when one studio made Armageddon, another had to make Deep Impact at the same time or when Dante’s Peak came out, a competing studio had to release “Volcano” the same year?

I wanted to like this movie, but the musical numbers were truly bizarre and VERY cringe worthy. Large swaths of the plot also made no sense, like when his lifelong best friend was angry at him for liking Bruce and not the twinky 80’s glam music he was into. Yea, it totally seemed realistic that lifelong pals would stop speaking over that and be genuinely hurt. Get a grip.

The Bruce songs were nice, too bad he has become so insane and politically inclined, and also too bad that this movie was so poorly made and not at all emotionally engaging. I didn’t care what happened to anyone in the film.

Sometime during the film, the meal service began. There was a decent soup followed by what looked like a rubber chicken, then a credit card sized piece of cake. I’ve had better meals on intra-Europe flights. BA is tragic.

Next up, I watched "Ad Astra." As I recall it got good reviews from the critics, but audiences felt it was too slow and boring, I didn’t agree. I liked it, but it was full of holes.

It seemed like it was an attempt at a space age retelling of Heart of Darkness, with McBride heading further and further “upriver” to the Moon, then the Mars base, etc…He’s even hitching a ride on a ship with a crew who don’t know his final mission and looking to confront a former hero who seems to have gone rogue in the outer reaches and killed his crew and gone insane.

The run in with the distressed spacecraft filled with killer space monkeys felt like something directly out of Apocalypse Now, as did the comments on mental health during the psych evals and McBride’s voiceovers which I could almost hear in Martin Sheen’s voice. All we needed was Robert Duvall and Ride of the Valkyries.

A few distracting inconsistencies also bothered me, like when Donald Sutherland tells Brad Pitt he went to Purdue with his father, then 10 minutes later they list his father’s bio as Air Force Academy then MIT.

Finally, I am no scientist, but the ending seemed ridiculous. He jumps off this space ship and somehow generates sufficient velocity to propel himself through Neptune’s rings and back towards his spacecraft? Also he manages to jump at precisely the right heading, since he has no way to adjust course, a sheet of metal is sufficient shielding to get through the debris in the rings of Neptune and none of the impact in the rings push him off this course which allows him to smack into his ship, grab on and board…OK. JUST JUMP!

All that being said…I liked the movie.

Once it ended, I was feeling sleepy, so I put the seat back, awkwardly laid down the mattress pad while I was in the seat, since there’s nowhere to stand and do it, then slept until we were 15 minutes from touchdown.

Few business class flights are horrible, and this one was OK. BA is OK, maybe the new Club Suite will move them from merely OK to outstanding, but for now they’re an acceptable carrier you only fly when they’re the cheapest option, definitely don’t make a point of seeking them out.

GetSetJetSet

BA 99

GetSetJetSet

The Hazelton / Toronto

I had agonized over what hotel to book for my one night stopover in Toronto…not even one night really, more like 12-14 hours.

The easiest and most convenient thing to do would have been to book a cheap airport hotel, go from the terminal to bed and then back the next morning.

However, I was just shy of LHW Sterling status, and figured I might as well get over the hump; but the idea of paying for a nice hotel in Toronto and only spending ~12 hours there seemed like a huge waste to me.

Still, I surmised that if I paid for the airport hotel, I would have to book a 1-night “staycation” at a NY LHW property to get to Sterling anyway, and in the end paying for those two nights would be more of a waste of $ than just paying a bit more for the night in Toronto and being done with it, so I booked The Hazelton.

The LONG wait for my gf’s luggage piece delayed me by 20-30 minutes from getting out of YYZ. Once out into the freezing Canadian winter it was only about 30 minutes to Yorkville where The Hazelton is located.

I wasn’t expecting much from this hotel, but they blew my expectations away and they are now my go to hotel in Toronto.

At check-in they informed me that I’d been upgraded to an Executive Suite, and as a Leaders Club member, I also had breakfast included. Since they only do a la carte breakfast, this was made into a 50 CAD credit for breakfast in the room or the restaurant.

The room was absolutely enormous. A big dressing area adjoining a massive marble bathroom complete with the largest and deepest soaking tub I’d seen in months; a nice bedroom with sliding doors opening to a big living room and finally a desk in a little nook around the corner.

I was sad my stay would be so brief. I took a very relaxing bath, then turned in. We had landed around 830pm and it was almost 10 by the time I got into the room and I was beat.

I have a good buddy from hockey in Toronto that I wanted to catch up with, but after a 10pm arrival from another continent with a connection the next day I just couldn’t hack drinks. I ‘ll make time to see him soon.

I fell asleep straight away but woke up a bit after 5am again, love that jetlag. I answered some emails and started looking at upcoming bookings I needed to make. I couldn’t settle on the dates for May airfares exactly so I decided to table that.

I searched for the FUK-HKG seats I had long been looking for in July and this time to my surprise the BA website showed me two! I verified the availability 2-3 times, then moved some Chase UR points over. I clicked through to book and got an error saying I needed more miles. They must not have posted. I logged out, logged back in, saw the miles had posted and searched again for my seats. No availability. Wonderful. I don’t know if it was phantom avail or some other person snagged both biz seats on that random FUK-HKG flight 8 months from now in the 30 seconds it took me to log out and log in, but I came up empty.

With that booking off the table, I then started building out a possible itinerary for early December 2020 that would allow me to see a new place while heading to London for advance Christmas again with my gf’s parents.

While this was meant to be exploratory I quickly found myself moving more UR points to AF and booking a KLM J flight from Paramaribo to Amsterdam with a connection on to LCY. The KL flight didn’t operate the follow day, was 2x the mileage the previous day and didn’t operate the day before that so I figured it was prudent to lock it in since it was my ideal travel day.

I continued mentally from there. AA flights to Georgetown, Guyana were not yet on sale, but the nascent planning for this little jaunt would now take me from NYC to Guyana, a few nights in Georgetown, then overland to the border, a ferry crossing to Suriname then continuing overland to Paramaribo for a few nights before heading to London. I imagine afterwards I will pop in to Paris and perhaps try to find AA SWU avail on my Holy Grail SWU route of HKG-LAX/DFW-GRU/EZE, as ex-HKG tickets can be had for under $800 one way, and only ONE SWU will upgrade the entire journey. We’ll see how it goes.

I further started tweaking the proposed NYE ’20-’21 itin which at present looks like Maputo-Tofo-Bazaruto-Mazini/Mbabane-Maseru-Maletsunaye Falls-Bloemfontein-Joburg-Amritsar-Lahore-Delhi-Udaipur-Bombay-Kovalam-Maldives TBD-Male-Colombo-Amangalla-Amanwella-Colombo-Pondichery-Chenaii-TBD departure back to France or east to HKG then on to NYC. We’ll see how that plays out over the next few months of planning!

By this point, it was 6:30am, so I ordered breakfast and some coffee as sleep was clearly not in the cards.

I took a final bath in the wonderful tub before packing my gear and heading to YYZ for Flight #100, the final connection back to NYC for Christmas. It had only been a two week trip, but it felt much longer.

GetSetJetSet

GetSetJetSet

AA 3350
YYZ-LGA
Embraer ERJ-140LR
N831AE
Seat 11A (COACH)
Flight #100 of 2019

After such a wonderful trip a 1-hr monoclass regional jet flight seemed like an anticlimactic way to wrap thing up, but oh well.

I got my BP, dropped the checked bag for screening and went through the Global Entry line.

For some reason, often when I am transiting YYZ, they ask me to get my Global Entry card out to show them, never happens anywhere else. Huge hassle to dig through my luggage for it, like listen guys…trust me, I am enrolled.

The airport was surprisingly empty which was nice.

The AAdmirals Club at YYZ is small but fairly nice as far as AAdmiarals Clubs go. It was maybe 40% full which is way more than usual, but there was still plenty of seating to go around.

Our flight was leaving from Gate A9, which meant going downstairs and walking outside and up a metal ramp to the plane.

The inbound was maybe 20 minutes late, so we were likewise pushed back.

As an EXP, I was “Group 2” for this flight, which makes no sense to me. There’s a pre-boarding call for CK, and there is no first class on a monoclass RJ, so essentially there is no Group 1, odd AA quirk.

As I boarded the plane, I got a nice reminder that I was back on an American carrier. The stewardess was in the galley texting, completely oblivious and indifferent to the passengers boarding. Going for great!

It’s a lousy RJ on a 1-hour flight, what can I say? Seat 11A, the Exit Row “one” side of the 1-2 cabin config is in my opinion the best seat on the plane, which isn’t saying much.

It was a short flight, so at least there’s that. After we landed at LGA, we had to park remotely and be transferred to Terminal B by a BUS. I don’t think I have ever done that at LGA before. They dropped us by some raggedy door and we walked up what looked like a maintenance staircase into the terminal. AA are running a top notch operation. What was worse, the whole fiasco with waiting for a place to park, the bus, etc…took almost as long as the entire flight in from Toronto.

By the time I got to baggage claim, it had been so long that all the bags had already come out. I grabbed the suitcase, got an uber and that was that…back in NYC, trip over.

In the handful of days since, all my flights have been scrubbed by weather, so it’s unlikely I’ll have enough time to get my wings before Christmas. It’s unfortunate, but not the end of the world. I will be departing the day after Christmas for a 2-month trip, so I guess it’ll have to wait until Feb!

I hope you've enjoyed coming along for the ride.

gaobest

I loved the Time lyric - always assume that people born after 1980 aren’t listening to Pink Floyd! So big treat to read...

lovely pics after Venice and guess big Q is if you still like Kamp more than Hazelton. Nice new discovery, that’s always fun. The 99s are fun (ba99 / flight 99 / #99 ).

super weird that EXP aren’t group 1 or even preboard - United 1K get to preboard before group 1 (but still after gS-CK), which is amusing since I’m in group 1 for F. Then it’s a scrum for overhead space for our 3 seats because they get full.

gaobest

Also enjoyed the movie reviews - what did you think of Yesterday? I quite liked it but also would have enjoyed Ad Astra. That movie made me think of Matt Damon and The Martian, which ends with a slightly amusing science trick.

GetSetJetSet

HUGE Pink Floyd fan, great band. Grew up on classic rock. The Kamp is for sure my sentimental favorite and I overall prefer it to The Hazelton but Hazelton was def the best tub.

I liked Yesterday. It was about 10x better than Blinded by the Light. The Martian was also a good movie ^